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Cucumber Soup

A chilled or warm cucumber soup made with veal stock, cream, and optional egg yolks and chili vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Cucumber and arrowroot share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 28 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cucumber Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare, split, and remove seeds from the cucumbers. Sprinkle with salt and let drain for 1 hour.

  2. In a deep saucepan, combine cucumbers and the white part of the onions. Cover with veal stock and simmer gently for 45 to 75 minutes until tender.

Make the soup

  1. Pass the mixture through a fine sieve and return to the pot. Add more stock to reach desired soup quantity.

  2. Stir in arrowroot, rice flour, or cornflour until the soup thickens slightly.

  3. Add boiling cream and season with salt and cayenne. Serve immediately.

Vary and finish

  1. For a variation, mix egg yolks with chili vinegar and stir in just before serving, adding minced parsley if desired.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Cucumber + arrowroottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together28 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Arrowroot + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together137 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Cucumber + parsleytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  4. Cucumber + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,050 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Cucumber + vinegartop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,734 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Make up the bulk of the soup and give its fresh, mild flavour once cooked and sieved.
Pale veal stock
Provides the savoury liquid in which the cucumbers become tender and forms the soup base.
Arrowroot, rice flour, or cornflour
Starch that thickens the puréed soup slightly as it is stirred in.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky body to the finished soup.
Egg yolks
Optional addition that enriches the soup and adds body when stirred in just before serving.

The step that matters

Stirring in the starch. Starch must be fully dispersed and the soup kept below a hard boil; otherwise it clumps and gives a grainy texture. Cornflour and arrowroot thicken as they gelatinise with heat, so only a slight thickening should be aimed for.

Swap the parsley

The recipe marks parsley as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, onion, veal, arrowroot, cream, egg, vinegar):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Garlicfits better
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, onion, veal, arrowroot, cream, egg, vinegar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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